“Alibaba Cloud” College Plan: Claim Five Years of ECS Cloud Servers for Free

Alibaba Cloud is a leading cloud computing service provider in China, but its products are not particularly cost-effective in everyday use. The high prices keep many college students and less affluent developers away.

However, some time ago, Alibaba Cloud launched a support campaign called the “Alibaba Cloud College Plan.” All accounts that complete student verification can directly claim a ¥300 voucher with no minimum-spend requirement, which can be used to offset costs for purchases, upgrades, renewals, and more.

According to my tests, whether you are a junior college student, undergraduate, or graduate student, and whether you study full-time or part-time, you can successfully pass verification as long as you are registered as an active student on the CHESICC website.

If you graduated a long time ago, or simply cannot obtain student verification, you can contact me through the official WeChat account “一纸忘忧.” For a fee, I can provide verified accounts. The account supports changing the bound mobile phone number, ensuring that ownership of the account is protected.

The main topic of this article is how to use this ¥300 voucher with no minimum-spend requirement to purchase a five-year Alibaba Cloud ESC server.

Claiming the Voucher

Campaign URL: https://t.aliyun.com/U/7uRdEp

Random red packet: https://t.aliyun.com/U/X6r6Fw

1. Complete real-name verification
2. Complete student verification after completing personal real-name verification
3. Claim the ¥300 voucher with no minimum-spend requirement
4. Claim a random red packet worth 20–100

If you cannot complete student verification, you can contact me through the official WeChat account “一纸忘忧.” For a fee, I can provide verified accounts.

Selecting a Server

Open the ECS purchase page: https://t.aliyun.com/U/htA8pV

Select the region: North China 6 (Ulanqab)

Instance specification: Burstable Performance Instance t6 (ecs.t6-c4m1.large)

Burstable Performance Instances limit CPU usage frequency. If you need to configure the environment and perform similar operations at the beginning, it is recommended that you first enable Performance Unlimited Mode. This may incur some fees, which you can disable later yourself.

Next, select an operating system you are familiar with. I chose Debian 12 here. For the system disk type, select “Efficient Cloud Disk” and set the capacity to 20 G.

Here is the important part: under Bandwidth and Security Groups, select the option to assign a public IPv4 address, choose traffic-based billing, and then check the option to upgrade to CDT billing.

After enabling Cloud Data Transfer (CDT) billing, you receive 200 GB of public network traffic free each month, which can be used for server traffic billing. However, only 20 GB of this traffic can be used in mainland China regions.

Note that traffic exceeding the free quota is priced at ¥0.8/GB. If your server needs to be accessed externally, be sure to configure bandwidth limits to avoid surging traffic fees caused by malicious attacks.

If you do not need a large amount of bandwidth, I recommend setting the bandwidth lower here, such as 5 Mbps. This will generally prevent excessive traffic charges.

Selecting the Purchase Term

Finally, you can select the desired purchase term on the right. You can see that the cost for four years can be fully paid with the voucher. If you choose five years, you only need to pay a little over ¥40 more, which is an excellent deal.

You can choose according to your needs. If you have any other questions, you can also leave a comment below and we can discuss them together. I will say this three times because it is important: if you cannot complete student verification, you can contact me through the official WeChat account “一纸忘忧.” For a fee, I can provide verified accounts. (Don’t ask why I have only said it once; I already mentioned it twice above.)